Delhi gang-rape: Victim’s male friend battles survivor’s guilt

The male friend of the 23-year-old woman who was brutally gang-raped on December 16 said the perpetrators of the crime must be given death penalty as they cannot be burnt alive as wished by his friend in her last days.

The 28-year-old man, who had boarded the bus in which the incident took place, said he would always feel guilty for not being able to save her. “The guilt will always remain,” he said.

While recalling the attack that killed his physiotherapist friend and left him scarred both physically and mentally, the man said his friend wished that the accused be set on fire when he had gone to visit her in the hospital.

“They should at least get death penalty,” he said.

The woman, in the last line of her detailed statement to the magistrate, had urged that the perpetrators of the crime be burnt alive. “They should get the death penalty so that no other woman has to go through the same brutality. In fact, they all should be burnt alive,” she had said in her statement.

In his statement to the police, the victim’s friend had described how the bus driver had tried to run them over but he managed to save the victim in time.

“After brutalising her, the rapists dragged her from the back of the bus to the front door and threw both of us out. They thought she had died. I was in a sub-conscious state and remember the driver turning the bus so he could run us over. I pulled her to the side of the road and we managed to survive that day,” he said in the statement.

He told the police that initially he had resisted the attack but the accused overpowered him and had beaten him up with an iron rod.